(Third Way Report)–“Republicans have made crime a major selling point over the past several elections. In 2020 and 2022, they ran ads accusing Democratic candidates of wanting to “defund the police”– a position held by only a handful of fringe Democratic officeholders. In October 2022, one-quarter of ads from Republican candidates and PACs focused on crime. Republican-aligned Fox News aired, on average, 141 segments on crime across weekdays in the two months leading up to the midterms. In the week after the midterm, their coverage of violent crime dropped by 50%.
In March of 2022, we released a report that found murder rates in 2020 were 40% higher in Trump-voting states than Biden-voting states. In this follow-up report, we studied homicide data going back to 2000 to see if this one-year Red State murder epidemic was an anomaly. It was not. Despite a media narrative to the contrary, a wide and widening Red State murder gap has spanned the past two decades.
Some on the right argue that murder rates in red states are higher because of the blue cities in those red states. Of course, blue states have more blue urban areas than red states. That is what makes most states blue. The fact is that murder rates have increased in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
But to answer these critics, we performed an exercise to give red states a special boost. For this exercise, we removed all of the murders in the county with the largest city for 19 of 25 red states. In six rural red states home to no cities with large numbers of murders, this calculation was not possible based on available CDC data.2 Blue states would get no such advantage. But even with the largest city removed from red states, the Red State murder gap persisted.
Over the course of the full 21 years between 2000 and 2020, the Red State murder rate was still 12% higher than the Blue State murder rate, even when murders in the largest cities in those red states were removed. And the murder rate was still higher in 18 of 21 years.”
The one thing that Republicans are far better at than Democrats is messaging. Their ability to force-feed a narrative to the masses and have it gain traction as common knowledge is unrivaled. I’ve previously covered how Democratic Presidents have nearly doubled the economic success rate compared to their Republican counterparts over the last 100 years. Yet poll after poll suggests the average American believes that Republicans are better for the economy. When all the evidence and data are clear they almost always harm the country’s overall economic growth.
Crime is another issue where the public perception is so far off from the reality of the facts. Once again, Democrats have far outperformed Republican-led areas when it comes to crime and murder rates. What is even more shocking is that this study removed any Democratic-run city from the Trump-voting States to avoid any potential Republican rhetorical rebuttal of the report. Also if you notice that some of the worse performing Biden voting States like Georgia are led by Republican State Leadership.
So even with all of those caveats in favor of Republicans they still overwhelmingly are far worse on crime and it’s not even close. Even if you want to go by crime trends under Presidents. Bill Clinton took office at the peak of crime rates in America. His tenure saw a sharp decline throughout his two terms. Then George W Bush took office and the crime rates plateaued and fluctuated between going up and down but at no point was there a clear decline. When Barack Obama’s Administration was elected, again the country saw a dramatic decline in crime. He oversaw some of the lowest crime rates in decades. It wasn’t till the year Trump was elected that rates started to rise. By the time Trump left office crime was once again trending upward. Yet, since President Biden took over the Presidency crime has declined in each year of his first term.
So what is it about Republican leadership that creates a culture of increased crime rates that differs from Democrats?
- Guns: Gun ownership rates are far higher in red states than blue states. Studies have estimated that gun ownership rates are as much as twice as high in a typical red state than a typical blue state. Since 79% of all homicides are committed with a firearm, it stands to reason that more guns will produce more murders, not less.
- Poverty: Studies have found a correlation between poverty and violent crime. Red states tend to have higher poverty rates than blue states.
- Educational Attainment: Those who have a high school diploma or less tend to be overrepresented among victims and perpetrators of homicide. Increasingly, there is an educational attainment gap between red and blue states as well.
- Social Service and Police Resources: Despite accusations that Democrats “defund the police,” we found that cities with Democratic mayors fund police at far higher levels on a per capita basis than cities run by Republican mayors. In 2020, the 25 largest Democrat-run cities spent 38% more on policing per capita than the 25 largest Republican-run cities. In addition, blue states may be more likely to fund social service programs that help steer people away from violent crime than red states.
With such decisive results favoring Democrats on crime and murder throughout the United States. It’s obvious messaging is the true culprit. The problem lies with the media not necessarily the Democratic Party. Republicans have a huge network of conservative media outlets that act as the public relations agency for Right-Wing rhetoric and agendas. Democrats don’t have the same political propaganda machine to peddle their accomplishments for them. They rely on the mainstream media to cover the truth about what the facts say regarding the two parties’ results on a particular topic. However, the major networks are more concerned with what the people want to hear. So they will consume their content instead of their competitors. Shareholders and ratings have displaced the foundations of political journalism. So it’s as if the game is now rigged against the Democratic Party. That is the driving force behind The-Anti-Social-Media.com and my pen name C.E.O. I intend to fill the void left by the current state of political debate and to Create Equal Outrage that the Democrats have been lacking when it comes to messaging. However, unlike the Right-Wing equivalent, we don’t need to rely upon false narratives and misinformation, because we have the one thing that the other side will never have and that is the facts, truth, and morality are on our side. So now that you know the truth about what party is better at combating crime it’s incumbent upon you to further spread awareness. If not us, then who will?
For my previous article comparing the economic benefits of a Democratic President click the column below
For the full report by Third Way click the link below
https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-two-decade-red-state-murder-problem
The-Anti-Social-Media Pro-DEMOCRACY WING 